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| ISBN-13: | 9780804798365 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/04/2017 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary
By Elizabeth S. Goodstein
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0073-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Simmel's Modernity
Marginality at the Center: Georg Simmel in Berlin Georg Simmel's marginality began during his lifetime, with an academic career that combined international fame with a long series of rejections and professional slights at the hands of the German professoriate. The author of more than two dozen books and hundreds of articles — an oeuvre comprising everything from thick tomes on moral philosophy and sociology to feuilletonistic fluff — Simmel published best-selling works of metaphysical speculation as well as a remarkably diverse range of essays on art historical, literary, sociological, and cultural topics. The critical edition of his works runs to twenty-four volumes, including two of letters, which by no means capture the original breadth of his correspondence, much of which has been lost forever. With his capacious and flexible mind and wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests came notable rhetorical talent, and Simmel enjoyed considerable fame in his own lifetime as a writer and speaker both in Germany and abroad. Significantly, though, he remained at the margins of the academic establishment.
Simmel was a philosopher and sociologist of recognized scholarly stature; he was also what we would today call a public intellectual. Recent research has underlined his impact beyond academic circles, including on key figures in the new social movements of the day, such as the feminist Helen Stöcker and the expressionist writer and pathbreaking homosexual rights activist Kurt Hiller. He was also a fabled conversationalist, whose circles extended from Marianne and Max Weber to Rainer Maria Rilke, from Edmund Husserl and Heinrich Rickert to Auguste Rodin and Stefan George. George Santayana called him "the brightest man in Europe."
For many years one of Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität's most prominent intellectual figures, Simmel was a popular and influential teacher in the philosophy department (where he had also studied) from 1885 to 1914. His lecture courses, ranging over all five branches of philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic — in addition to sociology, became a "Berlin tradition." Hearers came from far and wide to experience a thinker who, in the words of one of the many eulogies published at his death, fostered the "rehabilitation of philosophy" and "exercised a more powerful influence on the spiritual development of the younger generation than the majority of his colleagues in the philosophical chairs of Germany."
With his vibrantly embodied delivery, Simmel appeared to be thinking aloud, and he was able to convey the most abstract ideas in such an animated fashion that, as the literary critic Paul Fechter recalled, "the listener's thinking along also came to life and understanding arose of its own accord." According to his admirers, Simmel's popularity was not due merely to his rhetorical brilliance. In the presence of this "genuinely cosmopolitan intellect," the philosopher Karl Joël wrote, one felt that "the zeitgeist itself had come to life." For Fechter, he had a Zeitinstinkt, an instinctive feel for the times, that allowed him to give form to the intellectual and social transformations under way and provide what his hearers most needed, "an interpretation of the era [Zeitdeutung] starting from the modern."
Many others remembered him in similar terms. Simmel's unusually public success as a philosopher was grounded in a cosmopolitan sensibility that resonated powerfully with his Berlin audiences. Skeptical, analytical, and highly sensitive, he experienced the modern world with visceral intensity — and strove to capture that experience and make it intelligible in speech and writing. Simmel regarded a wide range of hitherto unexamined phenomena as worthy of philosophical attention, and he was often accused of uncritically embracing all things new. In fact, his analytic attitude was considerably more ambivalent. If his contemporaries saw him as a personification of the zeitgeist, it was not simply because he epitomized the hypersensitive modern urban subject, but also on account of his deep awareness of the cultural costs of freedom and of the intimate losses suffered in pursuit of subjective autonomy.
Simmel's cosmopolitan sensibility, a distinctive combination of immersion in and distanced reflection upon the complex and contradictory achievements of modern society, provided the lived foundation for what I call his modernist style of philosophizing. His texts do not, as has so often been asserted, simply affirm or uncritically register modern experience, with all its fragmentation and contradictoriness, but embody a mode of reflection deliberately shaped by the striving to make the modern world intelligible on its own terms. From his genuinely cosmopolitan, that is to say, reflective and self-reflective, perspective, the fascination of the moment, the allure of the particular, provided an occasion, not an end, for thought. But the philosophical sophistication of Simmel's approach to the contradictory plenitude of modern experience has gone largely unrecognized, with even his advocates tending to overemphasize moments of apparent immediacy, of immersion in particularity, while downplaying and neglecting the countervailing movements of negation and distancing that also mark his style of thought.
Writing in the Hannoverscher Kurier on the tenth anniversary of his teacher's death, the philosopher, critic, and literary scholar Ludwig Marcuse attempted to capture what made him stand out as a philosopher, "and not only among those of this century." Recalling Simmel's objection to "imprison[ing] the fullness of life in a symmetrical systematic," he powerfully evokes an intellectual style that combined "a maximum of receptivity, of experiential breadth and depth with a maximum of intellectuality, scholasticism, Talmudism, addiction to rationalization," adding that Simmel's "sensual-soulful sensitivity created an uncommonly rich substance for his possession by thought" (BdD, 189).
Marcuse goes on to describe Simmel's distinctive form of dialectical thought, his "relativism," as lived experience: "We loved in Simmel the fascinating event that a human being of enormous experiential capacity repeatedly penetrated through all conceptual boundaries into unconceived spaces of the soul," then captured them in concepts only to find these in turn "left behind by new experiencing" (BdD, 189–90). Writing for an audience that shared this living memory of the teacher and philosopher, Marcuse invoked and affirmed Simmel's posthumously published prediction: "Why did he die without spiritual heirs? Because he was (as Rickert once called him) the systematizer of the unsystematic." However, Marcuse writes, "Only the dogmatic concept can become tradition" (BdD, 190).
Simmel's cosmopolitan fascination with emerging forms of individual and collective experience gave rise to a new "relativist" approach to philosophizing, to new kinds of cultural inquiry and modes of reflection on the phenomena of everyday life. Such investigations always had high theoretical stakes: Simmel was striving to modernize philosophy, to achieve reflective traction on the historical and philosophical situation of modern western Europe and on the lived experience of those inhabiting and constituting that world.
Yet it is a mistake to think of this modernist philosopher as a philosopher of modern experience. For Simmel the entire relation between philosophy and experience was at stake, as it was for Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche before and Husserl and Heidegger after him.While emphasizing philosophical problems that had gained particular urgency under modern historical and sociocultural circumstances, he did not develop a philosophy, much less a sociology, of modernity. Beginning with the phenomena of everyday life, Simmel led his listeners to timeless questions using a distinctive synecdochic logic that anchored the most abstract ideas in historical particularity. As the testimony of contemporaries shows, it was most of all this gift for making philosophical questions relevant to human existence that accounted for his appeal.
Like Hegel, that other great master of synecdoche, Simmel found philosophical entrée in the most insignificant features of everyday life. The novelist Frank Thiess recalled his "incredible ability to concretize an abstract process" and knack for discovering "the most inspired examples": "in two years of study in Berlin, I never heard an hour that was more interesting, riveting, animated, and exciting, than Simmel's "logic" lectures" (BdD, 177).
Simmel's modernist pedagogy opened up new vistas for thought. For the novelist Georg Hermann, he was an "anatomist of the ultimate stirrings of the soul that in others took place deep in the darkness of the subconscious," the "idol of youth" who became "the greatest experience of our years at the university" (BdD, 163). Simmel "proclaimed a 'turning away from mere thought' and believed that the immediacy of existence could be experienced 'only in its own profundity,'" Ludwig Marcuse recalled. This thinker who "abhorred the robustness of manipulable formulations" thus lived on in the memory of his students as "the original image of a philosopher" (BdD, 190–91).
Simmel's rhetorical brilliance and his gift for connecting philosophizing to lived experience were, then, placed at the service of the most intimate, yet most traditional, of pedagogical ends. In the words of the twentieth-century Dutch American geostrategist Nicholas Spykman, Simmel "aided his students in finding themselves" rather than propagating a doctrine of his own (BdD, 187). His private seminars were formative philosophical experiences for thinkers as diverse as Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Bernhard Groethuysen, György Lukács, Karl Mannheim, Gustav Radbruch, Max Scheler, Margarete Susman, and Leopold von Wiese.
Simmel's cosmopolitan approach attracted a cosmopolitan audience. From early in his career, his lectures and private seminars drew admirers from afar — from North and South America as well as eastern and western Europe and Japan. Before the turn of the century, his lecture courses had already taken on the character of public events and were held in the largest auditoria of the Berlin University. But Simmel's popularity and the diversity of his audience were a source of suspicion. In a fateful denunciatory letter, the historian Dieter Schäfer, a student of the nationalist Heinrich von Treitschke's, called attention, not only to the large numbers of women attending Simmel's lectures, but to many listeners from "the Oriental world ... streaming toward [Berlin] out of eastern lands" among his audience.
If Simmel's public success reflected the rhetorical talent that made him an unusually gifted teacher and lecturer, it nonetheless rested on solid academic credentials. In no small part due to his attempts to lay the theoretical groundwork of sociology, Simmel gained international scholarly recognition well before the publication of his masterwork, Philosophie des Geldes (translated as The Philosophy of Money), in 1900. The earliest commentaries on his work appeared not in Germany but in France, the first in 1894 — a full twenty years before he finally received a regular professorship. The first book-length monograph on his work (likewise in French) was published the same year he left Berlin for Strasbourg, but well before 1914, Simmel's intellectual impact had been reflected in literature in Czech, Russian, and Italian as well, and his work had been translated into an even wider range of languages, including Danish and Polish. The earliest English translation was an excerpt from his Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft (Introduction to Moral Science) that appeared in the International Journal of Ethics in 1893, shortly after the German original was published.
The efforts of Simmel and his supporters to secure him a position commensurate with his talents and achievements were nevertheless repeatedly rebuffed. In the charged atmosphere of fin de siècle Berlin, his public success only exacerbated his status as academic outsider. By 1910, he had acquired a certain ironic resignation, writing a colleague: "German officialdom takes me for a kind of 'corrupter of the young,' and I shall thus surely never receive a professorship — even when, as happened two years ago, the Heidelberg department, indeed, the whole university (as the rector at the time put it), supported me in a way that had not happened for any appointment in years."
Simmel added that he enjoyed great pedagogical success — "numerically speaking" among the best in the country — and that "the area of my philosophical activity is about the most extensive of any German professor. It encompasses the entire history of philosophy, logic and psychology, ethics and aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, sociology, and the philosophy of right." But neither his success as a teacher nor the breadth of his course offerings necessarily accrued to his advantage. There was considerable hostility to Simmel, as well as to what he represented — not only the entry of Jews into the university, but also unconventional scholarship that questioned established assumptions and even institutions.
Correspondence with the aforementioned rector of Heidelberg University, the legal philosopher Georg Jellinek, in early 1908 illustrates Simmel's considerable insight into the difficulty of his position. His appointment to the Heidelberg chair formerly held by Kuno Fischer initially seemed virtually assured — he was in the second position on the list sent to the ministry in February, and Heinrich Rickert, whose name was first, wanted to remain in Freiburg. Upon learning that the minister of culture "was reconsidering the matter for various reasons," Simmel responded with considerable equanimity, treating the delay as a routine bureaucratic development and proceeding to put forward tentative plans for taking up the post in Heidelberg in the coming semester.
But a conversation with an unnamed official of his acquaintance awakened familiar concerns and prompted him to write to Jellinek again the following day. Simmel was widely regarded, he had been told, as "a purely critical spirit, who teaches students only the critique of everything and thus has a destructive effect, tending toward mere negation" — an "opinion," the man had assured him, that was "consistently joined with the greatest recognition of your professional achievement." Palpably alarmed, Simmel continued,
As I heard these words, it suddenly went through my head — with the conviction that we sometimes have for entirely unproven things — that the minister's reservations of which you hinted to me can be traced to this, probably only to this "opinion." He will have heard from someone or other that I am a hypercritical, merely analytical thinker who corrupts the young in a properly Socratic way.
His letter attempts both to explain and to combat the putative charge.
The source of the problem lay, Simmel thought, in a work he had published sixteen years earlier, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, "admittedly a critical book. Since then I have been cursed for only offering negativities, and everything positive that I have done since then has been unable to eliminate this aliquid haerens [thing sticking to me]." But he had long since left behind his youthful stance: "I don't believe that there can be a book more averse to mere critique and more positively oriented toward the understanding of history and life than the Philosophy of Money." As for his teaching, one could dispute the worth of his lectures, but to call them merely critical would be nothing less than a "falsification of the facts," for he shared "Nietzsche's view: 'where you don't love, you should pass over.'"
Simmel had correctly discerned that his seemingly certain appointment in Heidelberg was endangered. He wrote Max Weber the same day, beginning by rehearsing the accusation that he was "an exclusively critical, even destructive spirit and that [his] lectures lead only to negation" and continuing:
Probably I don't need to tell you that this is a terrible falsehood. Like all of my work, my lecture courses have for many years been directed exclusively toward the positive, toward the establishment of a deeper understanding of world and spirit, with a complete abstention from polemic and critique with respect to other positions and theories. Anyone who understands my lectures and books at all can only understand them thus.
Beneath his exasperation at the idea that the professional judgment of the Heidelberg philosophical faculty might be set aside on the basis of deliberate distortions of the record, Simmel was clearly beginning to come to terms with the possibility that this prestigious and seemingly assured professorial appointment would come to nought. He closed on a high note, remarking that however things turned out, what the whole process had revealed was "a thousand times more valuable to me than any sort of external success can be, the respect and love of so many and of such people."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary by Elizabeth S. Goodstein. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsPrologue: Modernist Philosophy and the History of Theory
chapter abstract
The Prologue sets out the challenge of understanding a thinker who does not fit comfortably into disciplinary categories, presenting Simmel, who was known as a sociologist, a neo-Kantian, and a philosopher of life, as a liminal thinker whose fame and subsequent marginalization index a theoretically significant illegibility. Embracing this marginality and foregrounding the complexity and multiplicity of his oeuvre, it argues, can render Simmel's historical and theoretical significance visible, helping establish critical perspective on contemporary modes of thought by exposing the intertwined genealogies of the academic disciplines of philosophy and sociology and of the metadisciplinary divisions between the humanities and natural and social sciences. Approaching Simmel as modernist philosopher suggests a strategy for rereading the intellectual history of the twentieth century that recognizes his inter- and trans-disciplinary theoretical contributions even as it identifies unrealized possibilities in the liminal space before the modern disciplinary ordering of inquiry was naturalized.
1Introduction: Simmel's Modernity
chapter abstract
Drawing on primary sources that attest to Simmel's wide-ranging impact on modernist cultural and intellectual life, but also to his checkered academic career, Chapter 1 situates the world-famous philosopher, sociologist, and public intellectual in the historical and cultural milieu of fin-de-siècle Berlin. It introduces the problem of disciplinarity: Simmel's contributions to social science were initially regarded as philosophical innovations, and his self-understanding as a thinker changed over time. Thinking back beyond the naturalized bifurcation of reflection on social and cultural life into humanistic and social scientific disciplines by exploring the meaning of Simmel's shifting self-definition can disclose new resources for cultural theory. Although Simmel's conceptual and methodological role in helping reframe the philosophical inheritance goes largely unrecognized today, terms and concepts with important histories in twentieth-century theory—including constellation, condensation, configuration, form of life, and life-world—may be traced to his work.
2Simmel as Classic: Representation and the Rhetoric of Disciplinarity
chapter abstract
Exploring the relations between Simmel's evolving self-understanding and the paradigm shift that brought the modern social sciences into being, this chapter focuses on the relativistic or perspectivist rethinking of concepts underpinning his mature, modernist approach to philosophizing. Presenting Simmel as a mostly forgotten founding father of modern cultural and critical theory whose work anticipated and influenced subsequent thinkers in many different fields, it begins a critical genealogy of his canonization that uncovers the distorting effects of Simmel's own self-representations. Arguing that he has been systematically misrepresented as an unsystematic thinker through his reception as a sociologist, it places him in the dialectical philosophical tradition, foregrounding Simmel's distinctive conception of form and underlining the importance of the focus on "super-individual" cultural and linguistic formations he inherited from Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie (cultural psychology).
3Memory/Legacy: Georg Simmel as (Mostly) Forgotten Founding Father
chapter abstract
This chapter considers how Simmel has been represented and read into the disciplinary canon and history of sociology. Centered on a close examination of the American reception that played a decisive role in establishing, but also marginalizing Simmel as a canonical sociologist, it foregrounds the repeated failures of efforts to overcome the clichés and misrepresentations that have shaped his reception. The hermeneutically questionable reading practices that have facilitated the entry of Simmel's ideas into social science have simultaneously rendered them fertile and obscured the larger philosophical horizons of his thinking. The combination of institutional and disciplinary liminality during his lifetime and a reception marked by ambivalence is historically and theoretically significant: Simmel's apparent illegibility, the chapter argues, can become a site for reflection on constitutive features of the modern disciplinary imaginary that do not form part of methodological self-consciousness and thereby disclose new theoretical resources for today.
4Style as Substance: Simmel's Modernism and the Disciplinary Imaginary
chapter abstract
This chapter begins (re)reading key Simmelian texts for still-urgent theoretical and methodological concerns, presenting a work considered the first sociology of modernity, his 1900 Philosophy of Money, as a masterpiece of modernist philosophy and the twentieth century's most significant mostly unread theoretical text. Arguing that its highly selective reception in sociology has obscured the philosophical import of Simmel's approach to everyday social and cultural phenomena, it foregrounds the philosophical and methodological ambition of the work to render visible the contours of an influential modernist style of thought that helped reorient philosophy toward historically and culturally situated, lived experience. The chapter concludes with an examination of Simmel's rethinking of the concepts of culture and spirit, underlining the philosophical significance of the famous discussion of "The Style of Life" that concludes a work that "aspires to be a philosophy of historical and social life as a whole."
5Performing Relativity: Money and Modernist Philosophy
chapter abstract
Framed by a close reading of the Preface to the Philosophy of Money, this chapter interrogates the tensions between Simmel's methodological ambition and his avowed relativism. Tracing how the project initially conceived as a "psychology of money" took on philosophical contours, it examines how thinking money led Simmel to redefine his disciplinary identity. It then brings the Philosophy of Money's frequently misconstrued effort to create a "new story beneath historical materialism" into conversation with Simmel's conception of the value-, meaning-, and knowledge-generating "cultural process" in and through which, on his post-Nietzschean view, subjectivity and objectivity evolve. Finally, the chapter examines his phenomenological method for illuminating the contradictory multiplicity of (historical, spiritual, cultural) life through a systematic use of "phenomenal series" or "arrays of appearances" to perform a modernist affirmation of the complexity and contradiction of lived experience from the perspective of a cogent metaphysical relativism.
6Disciplining the Philosophy of Money
chapter abstract
Understanding Simmel's relativism as modernist method, this chapter considers how the Philosophy of Money destabilizes what have since become very real boundaries between philosophy and social science. It begins by examining early responses to the work, foregrounding the differential reactions to a modernist mode of theorizing that intervenes in multiple discourses without becoming part of the disciplines that generate them, then considers how the disciplining of Simmel's work as a sociological classic legitimates the very practices of selective reading through which his methodological and theoretical contributions are obscured. Simmel's self-reflexive attempt to illuminate the phenomenon of signification as a dimension of human (collective and individual) life remains liminal for both sociology and philosophy today. Presenting that liminality as a symptom of lacunae constitutive for the modern disciplinary imaginary as a whole, this chapter sets the stage for a return to Simmel's mature Sociology in Part III.
7Thinking Liminality, Rethinking Disciplinarity
chapter abstract
This chapter returns to Simmel's disciplinary identity from the perspective of the history of philosophy, attempting to understand a mode of theorizing not just interdisciplinary but preceding, thematizing, and opposing the disciplining of thinking in the early twentieth century. Taking up "the problem of sociology," then returning once again to the Philosophy of Money to consider the account of sciences and disciplines, norms and laws developed there, it asks how the intellectual-cultural and institutional formation of inquiry shapes what can be thought. After foregrounding Simmel's insistence that the cultural-intellectual configurations that organize our modes of inquiry must be grasped in their contingency and specificity, that we need to rethink conceptual consistency by developing "a new concept of cohesion" that refigures thinking about foundations and values in a relativist (historicist, culturalist) key, it returns to Simmel's highly self-reflexive conception of disciplinarity as a historically and culturally contingent formation.
8The Stranger and the Sociological Imagination
chapter abstract
This chapter returns to the problem of Simmel's disciplinarity to explore the theoretical potential of his marginality. Examining how his mature reformulation of the "problem of sociology" resituates the figure of the stranger in the dialectical philosophical tradition, it demonstrates that the pervasive troping of Simmel as the stranger he theorized has a symptomatic quality that casts light on the significance of history for theory. Only in light of the ambition and accomplishment of the Philosophy of Money, it argues, do the disciplinary and meta-disciplinary contributions of the Sociology become legible. Here, too, Simmel's modernist reimagining of conceptual consistency is conveyed performatively, via phenomenological series that refigure thinking in a relativist (historicist, culturalist) key. Disclosing new theoretical perspectives on difference and strangeness in (theorizing) culture and society, Simmel's modernist writing transgresses oppositions between humanistic and social scientific, metaphysical and empirical, that are constitutive for the contemporary disciplinary imaginary.
Epilogue: Georg Simmel as Modernist Philosopher
chapter abstract
As a mature thinker and public intellectual, Simmel strove to foster "philosophical culture" in the face of increasing disciplinary specialization and the professionalization of thought itself in the emergent modern research university. His late work, though frequently misconstrued as turning from sociology to a metaphysical philosophy of life, is continuous with the effort to modernize philosophy in the Philosophy of Money. Considering Simmel's time in Strasbourg and the impact of World War I on his thought and life, the Epilogue briefly discusses his influential late essays on culture and his final masterwork, the View of Life, underlining the significance of his subsequent virtual erasure from intellectual history. Letters written in the weeks before his death attest to Simmel's own insight into the untimeliness of his thought and suggest that his modernist revisioning of the very oldest aims of philosophy and philosophizing may provide a model for theoretical innovation today.